Good Indian Girls: Stories (16 page)

He lay in a confining, single bed in a small one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. There was a pleasant view from the window, and on the roof, he said, was a lush, well-watered garden. The room was full of books—books on Arabic and Swahili, Kazakh and Uzbek, Urdu and Sinhalese, and many, many more. He looked so much older than I remembered. A thick comforter covered his thin body. I made the two of us tea and sat down on a chair by the bed to listen to whatever he wanted to tell me. I had no questions for him.

It was because of the Esperanto classes he and my mother had taken that she left him. She couldn’t take his obsession with that crazy language anymore, and one day she packed what she could into three large suitcases and hailed a taxi to her cousin’s house in Flushing. My father told me now that she had never understood why he wanted them both to learn Esperanto. It may have seemed a little foolish—especially now that only a few decades after its birth, it was already a dead language—but he had had a reason.

He said that one night, when he was six—perhaps seven, he no longer knew—the whole village was awake, and the night had become a carnival. It was summer, those weeks before the monsoon broke the spell of heat and sweat that made such thick, airless nights. My father didn’t know why the people were out. It was no special festival, no holy occasion. Not even the Sikhs in the village seemed to be celebrating any holy day. He went from person to person asking, Why, Babuji? But no one would answer, saying only, Go play with your brothers.

The year, he said, was 1947. The month before, many of his friends had left the village. When India and Pakistan, born as twins, began their sibling rivalry, Muslims were fleeing west across the border while Hindus and Sikhs came east. Those who didn’t leave—or were too slow, or were caught (whether at night or in the daytime) on the roads or in the trains—were often killed by whoever was at hand, by whatever weapon was the quickest and most bloody. All the Muslim children he had played with were gone. Where is Sharif? he had asked his mother. Where is Hasan? But she wouldn’t answer. Go outside and play now, baccha, was all she said. He had walked over to their houses, but they were deserted. Everything was gone, the doors smashed down, the small fences broken.

Then had come the night that resembled a carnival. Everyone in the village—those that were left, the Hindu and Sikh families—stood in nervous clusters close by the railway tracks that passed through the village. The women brought out sweets and drinks for their husbands and fathers, and the men told jokes, laughed, fell into sudden, uneasy silences. Some were carrying guns, others short blades or kitchen knives, and others just sticks, spears, clubs. The children played war around their parents’ feet. My father battled his friend with a twig, shouting loud, pretending he was Arjuna, always victorious.

When he first heard the distant pant of the train, the vibrations resonating along the tracks, there was sudden silence. Somewhere far off, my father heard a voice. Everyone began to move back from the tracks. Someone tugged at his hand, pulling him along, Go home now, go to sleep, they said. But my father stayed, hiding first among all the legs, then behind the tall wheel of a cart.

No lights were on the train that finally approached. Before he could make out anything more than its shadow and the starlight catching the clouds of steam, there was a shattering explosion. The sky lit up, the stars momentarily hidden. The train buckled, was hurled from the tracks. The night filled with screams. The crowd surged forward, waving sticks and knives, guns setting the darkness on fire. My father said he could make out little, could barely see what was happening. All he heard was the screaming, the shouts, the sound— of clubs battering at bodies.

Hours later, in the hot dawn, the ground was a red swamp of blood. Much of the crowd was still there when my father appeared, tired, from his hiding place. There were bodies all around him, beaten, knifed, shot. A hand grabbed at his ankle. He recognized the face—it was the father of one of his friends, a Muslim, who had left the village only a week before. There was a knife wound across his face, and his chest was soaked in blood. My father screamed.

The flight was headed to Delhi when the bomb exploded. It was here, in India, the site of my father’s terror, that I was offered an opportunity to fully explain my ideas. A conference on the archaeology of Aryan races and their precursors had accepted my paper on the incipient language of early humans. The topic was only tangentially related, but it was the only meeting that even considered my synopsis. Changing planes at JFK, I thought about my father and that last time I had seen him in his apartment.

In that room, he said that he had once thought Esperanto the only hope. If only people could learn a common language—anything, even Latin, he had laughed hoarsely.
He knew he was wrong to have pushed it on my mother. He wished he had told her what he had seen, but he never had. The blood that lapped against the railway tracks was more than he could hope to tell her in any language.

But without a common language, what hope is there? he asked me. I placed my hand on his wrist, surprised to find how little flesh was left. It was almost all bone. With his other hand, he waved weakly around the room, motioning to the piles of books. These past years, he said, I’ve been trying to learn every language. I thought if the world doesn’t learn one, I will learn them all.

I do not know who set the bomb. No doubt some group claimed responsibility. The Tamils or Sikhs or Biharis, or maybe Hezbollah or Kurds or Greek Cypriots or the Red Army Faction or the Libyans or Welsh nationalists or the Basque or Puerto Ricans. It doesn’t matter to the dead. I do know I was standing up—I had wanted to get an article out of my briefcase in the overhead compartment. I clicked open the hatch and reached out to prevent anything falling, then searched inside for the handle of my briefcase. That was the last thing I remember. Seconds later I was scattered across the Atlantic Ocean by the force of the blast.

When I told my father that I was studying anthropology at Chicago, that I would soon finish my PhD, and that one day I hoped to lead expeditions in Ethiopia or Kenya, he had smiled. Anthropology, he said, isn’t all bad.

I’ve floated so far out that there is nothing on all sides of me except water and sky. All wreckage from the plane has disappeared from view. Nor do I know how long it has been—days, months, years. I am all alone. I hear no squawks
or grunts, only the sound of the waves, sometimes the wind, and I’ve long since lost hope of finding other parts of me. Some time ago I heard my own voice. I was arguing with my right knee, which had floated by. I desperately wanted to know what part of my body I am, and asked again and again. It soon became clear that we were both saying the same words, exactly the same, yet all I heard were grunts and mumblings carrying an old sensation, a fear in both our voices. As we floated apart, I thought of my father, who had wanted to understand everyone. And those last words of his. Incomprehensible.

The Consul’s Wife

ARJUNA LOOKED PEACEFUL, PARVATI THOUGHT, THE WAY
he was drowsing, coiled so tightly around the clawed base of the hall lamp. The previous week, when Krishna, Parvati’s husband, had told her he was retiring, she had thought of Arjuna, of whether he might like traveling to India. Since then she had studied Arjuna’s scales more closely, trying to gauge his moods, his desires, trying to decide whether India would really be the place for him. He seemed so happy here, though, so unperturbed and unperturbing.

He seemed especially happy where he lay, and this made it worse, because she would have to pick him up, this minute. She would have to hide him from the evening’s guests. She didn’t want to disturb him, to hide him in the hall closet like so many times before. But she knew that if she waited until later, the afternoon, perhaps, or the early evening, it would just be so much more difficult. He would be more lively, harder to control. No, it was better while he drowsed in the morning air. If only Krishna had given her time to prepare the house and dinner. He had managed it before—before he announced the retirement. He was the one to call the caterers, often weeks in advance, the maids, etc. Now it was too late. Next time, she decided,
she
would call the service.

Ever since he said it, that he was leaving the Foreign Service, he had been like this, acting on whims, doing things he would never have done before. Now sometimes he brought her flowers when he came home. Sometimes they drove down the winding coast highway to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and had a long, lethargic dinner at Carmel-by-the-Sea. Parvati found it all very tiresome. She had grown used to his absences, the demands of his work. He was like a new child, and she didn’t have the time or temperament to be a mother again, or even a young bride. And now this round of dinners. Tonight was only the first. He needed to say goodbye—he said, Adieu—to all the men and women he had worked with, the diplomats from other embassies, the officials in the various Federal offices. Only the beginning, thought Parvati, yawning.

She nudged Arjuna, the python, with the point of her stockinged foot, and then bent down and tried more forcibly to wake him. The cool silk of his scales passed across her palms and she found herself instead caressing his silent body, as if paying homage to some deep ancestral memory of her own.

Uncoiling him from the lamp, she picked him up, tightly gripping his belly with her slender fingers. He was heavy and bounced like a water-filled rubber inner-tube in her arms.

Normally, she would feel his body stiffen at her touch. This time there was no reaction. Arjuna was dead.

This fact surprised her. Not because she was unaccustomed to death. Parvati had reached an age where death had become an annual event, and each year she guessed which of her friends and acquaintances would go next. Arjuna had not changed in death. There was no discernible difference from
his living self, except that on prodding him roughly, his body only moved as far as her fingers pushed it. It was perverse, she thought, this similarity of life to death. All that was missing was the usual slight shiver which ran the length of his body, a wave, the slightest hint of animation.

Parvati had spent her life following Krishna along the various trajectories of his diplomatic postings. Though she had been born in India and was, by necessity of her husband’s position as a representative of that country, forced to call herself Indian, she no longer felt any attachment to the country. It had always been her job, she felt, to assimilate. Her husband was the Indian, the one representing Indian interests abroad. In Spain, while it was natural for him not to learn Spanish, the artifice of the translator allowing for both diplomatic distance and a sense of mutual control, it became equally natural for her to speak it fluently, as though she were a Spanish wife. The same was true in Germany, and later in Japan, though she never did manage to master a fluency in Japanese, however much she tried. With each country, she changed costumes. Though every outfit in her wardrobe carried with it a hint of that old country, that now almost ancestral India, she always tried, as she put it, to go native. She wore kimonos fringed with paisleys embroidered in gold silk, or smart European jackets with diminished collars, hinting at the old Nehru jackets.

Soon they would be going back to India—Back? she questioned—she didn’t know what she would do, what she would even wear. This was one transformation her life had not prepared her for. The day he told her, she sank into a shallow depression. Not a deep one. She knew that her position as a diplomatic wife did not allow her to do anything
deeply. She sat in her blue funk for two days, barely noticing the comings and goings of her husband, but later, when she thought back to that mood, she couldn’t remember what specifically depressed her. There must have been something, she felt, however small, some moment, some sight, some thought. Everything, she felt, was born of a recordable event, however ephemeral. But this mood of hers seemed to have grown either out of something so old she could not remember, or something so new, she had not yet recognized it. She tried not to think about it anymore. In any case, Arjuna was dead. And therefore something had to be done.

The only time she ever saw Arjuna active was when she fed him. Though he was actually Krishna’s snake, it fell to Parvati to feed him. Krishna had been given the python, nestled comfortably in a striking, ivory inlaid casket, complete with a manual on care and feeding, by a visiting dignitary. Parvati forgot which country. They all melted into a bland whole of foreignness to her, like the rows of tomato soup cans on supermarket shelves. On the outside of the casket, in bold, handcrafted lettering was inscribed “Python, family Boidae.” The instructions required that Arjuna be fed on live meat. Small birds, mice, rats, etc. Krishna had no stomach for this. She always considered him one step away from vegetarianism, or worse still, from some brand of Hindu asceticism. She shivered at the prospect.

She enjoyed feeding Arjuna. It was one of the few truly sensual pleasures left to her. There was a large cage she kept outside, one usually used to house rabbits or hamsters, in which she fed him. The mouse inside would bounce from side to side, like a buoy on a rough sea, as she opened the top to drop Arjuna in. The snake would slide down with the
ease of a ship dropping anchor in calm waters and squeeze all life from its prey.

Afterward, she would let Arjuna out and sometimes take him with her into the main dining room. There, slowly stripping away each piece of clothing until she lay naked on the intricately patterned Turkish kilim, she would allow Arjuna to range over her body like the silent breath of an illicit lover. The snake would pass over the wrinkled flesh of her thighs, pushing his way between her legs and then onto her belly and breasts like an advancing infantry accustomed to the shifting undulations of terrain in desert warfare. As the snake’s body pressed down on her face, Parvati sometimes lightly pushed out her tongue so that its tip could caress the scales of Arjuna’s underbelly. Sometimes she orgasmed, and these were the only times she managed that any more.